Where To Find The Best Property Deals on Help-to-Buy

Since help-to-buy was introduced by the Government, it has allowed many people to get on the property ladder who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. There’s no doubt that rising house prices and the huge deposits required can put the dream of home owning out of reach for many first time buyers.

Comparison site Totally Money has now produced an interactive map that allows anyone considering help-to-buy to find out where the best areas are. The site looked at 388 different regions and cities around the UK and measured a range of parameters including the average property prices, the number of per capita equity loans and the amount of ISA completions carried out.

Help-to-buy hotspots at a glance:

The best region to buy a property using the scheme is West Sussex where the top towns are Horsham and Arun.

The best district is Central Bedfordshire which has the most number of equity loans per capita.

The most popular city where help-to-buy is used to get on the property ladder is Wakefield.

There are variations not only within different regions but from town to town when it comes to help-to-buy which can be confusing. Popularity depends not only on property prices but the desirability of the location itself.

The scheme offers buyers equity loans of up to 20% of the property value (40% for London) which means that first timers only need to find the initial deposit, saved for through a high-interest ISA. Despite this, the help-to-buy scheme doesn’t work in all areas and there can be many factors that impact on whether you’re getting a good deal or not.

The top three districts for completed equity loans and help-to-buy ISAs are Central Bedfordshire, Chorley, and Cheshire West and Chester. Within an individual area, popularity can vary considerably and that can be associated with property prices as well as they type of property buyer attracted. In London, for instance, there were just 2 equity loans in Kensington and Chelsea where the average property price is over £2.5 million while in Havering, where the average price is £350,000, there were over 600 equity loans.

The Top Help-To-Buy Cities

Wakefield tops the list with over 610 buyers using the scheme to set up home between December 2015 and spring of 2017. Hull lies next on the list with a high number of loans per capita. That may be because the property cost is relatively low (on average £134,000) which means it also has one of the lowest deposit averages at just over £6,700. Third on the list is Salford, which has benefited in recent years from investments in infrastructure such as Media City. To date, 437 people have purchased homes using the ISA and a total of 718 equity loans have been issued.

If you are looking to get on the property ladder and want to know what benefit help-to-buy is going to deliver, you can now check out Totally Money’s interactive map